The Betty BoardsThis is a VERY large page, please be patient while downloading.

All of this information has been used without permission and is for informational purposes only, this is not a trading list or listing of current trees. This is for historical background on certain tapes currently in circulation. The original names and email addresses have been removed to protect the original participants. All of this material comes from other web pages, it is here to allow added and continuing access to for interested collectors and archivists.

List of "all known Betty boards" as posted on Terrapin Station BBS in Darion CT (no longer on-line).

What's Become of The Betty Boards release schedule.

Known recording lineages of tapes available in circulation

The Initial WBOTB post

Copies of the first few WBOTB posts to rec.music.gdead.

The original DAT WBOTB by tape #.

What's Become of the Bettys?

This is a list of all known "Betty boards" as posted on Terrapin Station BBSin Darion CT (no longer on-line).

New Riders12.02.71 The Boston Music Hall, Boston Massachusetts12.04.71 The Felt Forum, New York City (w/Jerry Garcia ?)12.07.71 The Felt Forum, New York City (w/Jerry Garcia ?)12.10.71 The Fox Theater, St. Louis, Missouri (w/Jerry Garcia ?)12.15.71 The Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor, Michigan05.26.72 The Strand Lyceum, London, England03.08.73 Berkeley Community Theater, Berkeley, California03.30.73 Community War Memorial, Rochester, New York04.02.73 Boston Garden, Boston, MassachusettsDate/Location Unkno(Probably 1973)

Hot Tuna10.02.73 Winterland, San Francisco, California

Jefferson Starship11.24.74 Winterland, San Francisco, California

Sons Of Champlin12.03.72 Winterland, San Francisco, California

WBOTBThis is the list of Betty boards that were scheduled to be redistributed under the What's Become of The Betty Boards moniker. The purpose was to get them back into circulation with known lineages. They DAT masters were to be made from the first generation PCMs, and in most cases decoding any Dolby NR.

These tapes are great folks. You don't just get to hear the clang and hiss of a cymbal, but to hear the wood striking the metal disk, the clang and shake and wobble of the hissing cymbal. Believe me friends, you ain't never heard a Betty Board before.

These tapes, although based on two track reels spun directly from the soundboard, should not be confused with soundboards that have been released in recent years. For one thing, many of the soundboards that the Dead have allowed to sneak out seem to have been slightly salted in one way or another to degrade the sound quality. These Betty Board tapes are pure and sweet, with no salting: they are better! For another thing, these Betty Boards reflect the limitations of working with 7" or 10" reel to reel tapes: sometimes a tape breaks off in the middle of a song; sometimes you can hear the tape spin up to speed at the beginning of a song. There are a few unpleasant reel flips here and there. There are several incomplete shows. Remember, these tapes were originally recorded many years ago by hippies on drugs!

Over the next several months, there will be twenty or so people posting tape trees and/or tape pyramids of these Betty Boards right here on rec.music.gdead. Some DAT trees. Some analog trees. Some newbies trees. Some oldies trees. Some mixed. Some swaps. Some blanks & postage. Some European. There are also several face-to-face trees up and running. Our point is to make hi-quality copies of these shows available to regular old Bozos and Bolos like you and me. No authoritarian trips. No hierarchy. In fact, little hierarchy at all. Friends are spinning copies for friends. We offer them to the community. Y'all come!

We'll be calling it the "What's Become of the Betty's" tree.

The postings should begin to appear shortly. We'll be going in chronological order, beginning with the 1971 shows. Eventually we'll even make it to 5-08-77 (tm) and beyond. Which shows? Well, you'll know that when we start posting. Let's keep this fun. You just won't know what's under the tree until Christmas morning. Nothin' left to do but smile, smile, smile.

I'm making this initial announcement through an anonymous account mostly because I don't want to be deluged with email. There are several of us whose main part of the tree is spinning seed for friends who will do the actual treeing. I'm one of the seed-spinners. My decks are *full* for the next seven months, which is how long it will take us to tree these tapes.

Here's a post that xx made a few days into the WBOTB project. Someone on r.m.gd attacked us for spinning low-gen tapes for newbies, arguing instead that only experienced tapes should get low-gen tapes and that newbies should be content high-gen tapes. Yup, the poster considered himself to be an "experienced taper" and he figured that the newbie slots that we included on every tree somehow prevented him from getting what we owed him. There were a lot of people who really hated us for getting low-gen tapes to newbies; they liked the hierarchy, and the ability to use low-gen tapes for leveraged trades. My response was to make the following "free tapes" offer to newbies.

May 26th is Pentecost Sunday, and it's time to make another newbie offer.

I will spin analog cassette copies of the Port Chester, NY, 02-18-71 show for five newbies. Although I hope that you will offer to spin for five morepeople, there is no requirement that you do so. In fact, you don't even have to send me blanks and postage; I'll spin the shows on Maxell XLII tapes and cover the first class postage on my end. I'll even print up J-cards with set lists and tape pedigree.

To give people with slow newsfeeds and digests a chance, I will only consider email requests that are *sent* between noon and six pm on Pentecost Sunday, May 26th. Shortly after sunset I will pick five people more or less randomly.

Since there will probably be more than five requests I will only respond to people who get picked. If you don't hear from me by Monday morning, you didn't get picked. Don't worry though, there will be plenty tree and pyramid offers of this show during the coming weeks.

These tapes are part of the current Betty Board project, and they're really sweet sounding. Your copy will be cassette-2. Their pedigree is:

The next batch of the "What's Become of the Betty's" project will be appearing here shortly. Several people are going to be offering trees and pyramids, so don't get all cranked if you don't get picked up by the first offer. There will be plenty of chances. Also, there will still be lo-gen analog and DAT trees of the first batch turning up over the next few weeks. Patience! This project is just beginning. If you missed out on the first wave, worry not; there will be plenty of others.

A reminder too: let's keep the fun in this, making it an adventure to find and share some sweet music rather than a shopping trip to tank up on your share of the entitlements. See Matthew 10:8 for clarification.

Now for a few other notes:

The batch of Betty Boards that we are working with on this project derives from the only complete set of PCM copies ever made *directly* *from* the original Betty Board 7" and 10" reels. Most of the other tapes in circulation derive from Beta HiFi, Reel to Reel, or other analog formats. Further, about 25% of the Betty Board reels were encoded with either Dolby A or dbx, and most Betty Boards in circulation are not decoded. Except for two shows (02-19-71 and 04-07-71), all of the NR encoded Betty Boards that will appear in the "What's Become of the Betty's" project *have* been decoded and have had the noise reduction *removed* using professional equipment. That's another reason why these tapes are so crisp and clear.

Then again, a couple of folks have said that these tapes don't live up to all the hype. Well, no one is forced to sign up for tapes.

I've been talking with our source on these BBD's, and thought of passing on something that I took for granted, but never really mentioned cause I assumed (bad idea) that everyone knew it. As pretty as the Betty Boards are, we gotta remember that they are not the band's tapes of these shows, but the *crew's* tapes. They were tapes that Rex Jackson, Kid Candelario, Betty Cantor, and others spun on two track reels and on 60 minutes cassettes (we don't have any of these latter). Although patched into the soundboard, these are not what tapers generally call soundboards, that is, they do not derive from the 16 track tapes that were cut for live albums, nor do they necessarily derive from the two track reference tapes that were spun most nights for the band to listen to. There will be a lot of tapers out there who actually have better quality soundboard tapes of these shows, and you have to remember that the soundboards are not the same thing as the Betty Boards, at least not necessarily.

4-08-71 is a tape in point. There is all sorts of stage talk and crew talk on that show, very low volume in most places, but a bit of it. Crank up the volume and listen in right before Playin, before Loser before BIODTL, or before Casey Jones. The crew were very stoned that night, and they left some of the mics on during the show and these got patched into the Betty Board. I particularly enjoy the "YOU put on the fucking headphones" bit before Casey Jones. We don't just get to be touched by the music, we get to touched by that very night.

I love this stuff, but it might be disconcerting to a lot of folks. We gotta let them know that these are Betty Boards; 7" and 10" reels of the *crew's* tapes that Betty had abandoned to rot in a storage locker. They were rescued from destruction (mostly, wait until you hear March 73!), and some of them only barely made it.

The WBOTB project includes cassette and DAT and VHS-hifi tape and CD trees all over the world: Scotland, England, Wales, Germany, Australia, Thailand, Israel, etc. One of our tree admins in Japan got into trouble with his sysop about tape trees, and that sparked a thread on r.m.gd about the legality of trading or tree ing these tapes. Our source for these tapes, as well as couple of people close to the Grateful Dead organization, cautioned us about attracting too much attention to the Betty Boards, reminding us all that in past years the Grateful Dead organization had sent out evil SOB lawyers to mess with people. Here's a caveat that I sent out to the WBOTB folks:

Hi Folks (including the kind souls in Japan),Our source for these Betty Boards has asked us not to get involved in any sort of a legality thread on r.m.gdead or elsewhere about swapping Betty Boards. A sysop in Japan is giving one of our fellow tapers a bit of a hassle about the legality of trading GD tapes that contain covers of other people's music. The last thing we need to do is to get the attention of the GD corporate structure. The GD are still *very* aggressive about the Betty Boards, and still consider them to be somewhat outside the pale of normal taper activity.

Well folks, The Unindicted Co-Conspirators are about to start offering up another round of Betty Boards as part of the What's Become of the Betty's project.

For this batch of tapes, we're finishing up 1971, 1972, and getting into 1973. For various reasons, we've dubbed these BBD's "the batch from hell," partially because there are a lot of incomplete shows, but partially because several of the March 1973 reels suffered mold and water damage while in the storage locker, and there is distortion on some vocals and some peaks. As these shows are offered, we will include descriptions of which shows are damaged, and how they sound. CAVEAT EMPTOR!

DAT: Mostly we'll be offering the DAT trees on the BUDD and DAT-Heads mailing lists. To subscribe to the BUDD list, send mail to Majordomo@io.com with the following command in the message body: subscribe budd <your email address> To subscribe to DAT-Heads, send mail to dat-heads-request@virginia.edu with the following command in the message body: subscribe dat-heads <your email address>

The DAT trees will be a bit more hierarchical, and the r.m.gd offers a bit more anarchistic, as with previous offers. This allows us to plant DAT-2 seed all over the country over on BUDD and DAT-Heads, and allows us to keep things loose and fun on right here on r.m.gd. And believe me folks, we've gotta loosen up a bit here on good old r.m.gd ...

As regards analog cassettes, there will be general offers, as well as offers that are specific to European or Asian deadheads. There will be trees, pyramids, and all sorts of variations in-between. Several people are going to be offering these tapes under the WBOTB moniker, and they will be doing so for months, so don't get all cranked if you don't get picked up by the first offer.

A reminder too: let's keep the fun in this, making it an adventure to find and share some sweet music rather than a shopping trip to tank up on your share of the entitlements.

And speaking of anarchy, here's a reworking of a fine old Wobbly song that was originally written by Joe Hill, everyone's favorite Wobbly.

There's a power, there's a power, In a batch of Betty Boards, When you hold them in your hands.That's a power, that's a power, That must sound for every man, In one hundred tape-trees grand.Posted on behalf of "The Unindicted Co-Conspirators,"

xx

and

xx

What's Become of the Bettys?

Here is a description of the Betty Board tapes that were (or will be) treed in the What's Become Of The Bettys? tape tree project by the Unindicted Co-Conspirators: Jace Crouch, Ernie Kelley, Tim Deibert, Rob Battaly, Rick Rodrigues, Eliot Gelwan, Bob Loewenthal, Debbie Collmer, Thayer Jennings, John Dodsworth, Steve Nichols, Mark Schaeffer, and Jeff Tiedrich. Jace's DAT source tapes came from one of the participants in the original Betty Board project, a decent fellow from the west coast who wishes to remain anonymous. A detailed description of the pedigree of each tape is included for those who care about such things. The DAT copies distributed by Ernie Kelley and Jeff Tiedrich (and their branches) were direct clones of Jace's tapes, which were vined through several people on the east coast and the midwest in the years 1996 through 1999. Vining these DAT tapes took quite a bit of time, and at least one source tape was destroyed in the process, but this vining allowed all of Ernie and Jeff's branches to have clones of Jace's source tapes. The WBOTB CD project started up in 1999, so you should keep a look outfor WBOTB CD tree offers on r.m.gd and elsewhere.

All of the WBOTB folks offer our heartfelt thanks to the anonymous source for these splendid tapes. Well done guy!

All of this information has been used without permission and is for informational purposes only, this is not a trading list or listing of current trees. This is for historical background on certain tapes currently in circulation. The original names and email addresses have been removed to protect the original participants. All of this material comes from other web pages, it is here to allow added and continuing access to for interested collectors and archivists.